Summary: 4 simple optin form personalization tactics that make your lead generation and nurturing 100% more powerful. All of this without a pricey automation tool.

Personalize, segment, and target …

No, we aren’t going to get into any marketing jargon here.

But, we will talk about the above terms and see how they impact your business revenue’s bottom line.

And it doesn’t matter whether you run an online store, a publication, or a business site; these concepts apply seamlessly to all. Consider them to be the 3 stages in any high-converting lead generation and conversion funnel.

Let’s consider an example to understand these terms better.

Assume that you run a popular diet magazine and publish stories around various diets like Vegan, Paleo, Zone and others. Let’s also say that you’ve hired some of the top diet experts from each niche, and that your magazine attracts followers (or potential followers) of the different diets.

Personalize (your optin offers)

Now let’s look at a random site visitor, (we’ll call her Jane). You realize that Jane spends some time reading your content around the Paleo diet.

What does this data tell you?

Well … it gives a hint that Jane is interested in the Paleo diet.

So, if you had to ask Jane for her email, what should you say?

“Hey Jane, give me your email and I’ll SPAM you about every single story (on about 20 different diets) on my magazine?”

This is what optin personalization is all about: personalizing the optin offer to match the interests of the visitor.

For implementing optin form personalization, all you need to do is create different optin forms for the different kinds of content on your site and show them to the visitors who land on or spend time on the different content categories.

Personalization helps you way beyond collecting more emails. It enables you to segment your list in a meaningful way, so you can send targeted offers to your list. Let’s talk about segmentation first.

Segment (your email list)

The biggest benefit of creating multiple optin forms is that it lets you divide your list into segments.

Here’s how it works:

In our example, your master list will be divided into segments like Paleo, Vegan, Zone and more representing the different categories on your site. And as discussed in the above section, each of these content categories will have personalized optin forms.

The submissions from an optin form get added to the corresponding segment in the email marketing list. And so you end up with multiple segments in your list.

In our example, Jane and all the other people who fill out the optin form personalized for the Paleo diet will be added to the Paleo segment in the list.

By adding Jane and other subscribers with a similar interest to the right segment, you can ensure that you only send them the emails they signed up for (updates from the Paleo category).

Let’s now see how such segmentation helps you get more sales.

Target (your subscribers with relevant offers)

Since you know that Jane is interested in the Paleo diet, and because you’ve added her to the relevant segment in your subscriber base, you’ll know exactly when to email Jane.

With personalization and segmentation, you’ll know exactly when to email your subscribers and about what. Such targeting is impossible without knowing which segment a subscriber belongs to.

In the example we’re discussing, we could email Jane when we:

featured a celebrity Paleo follower

had a deal on Paleo snacks

published an expert interview

And so on. As you can see, these offers are targeted and people in the Paleo diet segment will find them relevant.

If you contrast this situation with one without segmentation, you could keep pitching your list with content upgrades, offers and deals, all of which would be irrelevant to the majority of your subscribers.

For example, if you had a list of 10,000 subscribers, of which just 1,200 were into Paleo, your Paleo update emails would be nothing but SPAM to the rest. And such updates would obviously lead to many unsubscribes.

Now, imagine if I took away the first step of creating personalized optin forms from this process…

Would we have the right segments in our list?

No.

Would we be able to send targeted offers?

Unlikely.

Personalization is the ONLY way of building a well-segmented list, especially for sites that cater to audiences with such varied interests.

Before we see the different ways you can personalize your optin forms, let’s look at the two types of optin form personalization.

The 2 types of optin form personalization

Essentially, optin form personalization can be classified into two types. The first one is manual; the second one is kind of automated.

Type #1: Manually personalizing the offer using different form copies and triggering rules

Manual personalization involves two steps:

Step #1: Creating multiple optin form copies based on the different audience types and categories.

Step #2 : Setting up rules or conditions for triggering the different forms.

If you were to implement such personalization using a lead generation tool like Digioh, here’s how you could do it.

Just choose an optin form template and customize it, just as I’ve done for the optin form for the Paleo followers from our example:

Next, for the rules, I’m setting up the optin form to trigger on all the pages/posts that are about Paleo:

With this rule, this optin form will show up before all the users who show interest in any of the posts on the Paleo diet.

Notice that I’m setting up the form to trigger after the visitor spends about 10 seconds on the page. This rule is just to ensure that the reader is fairly engaged before we pitch the subscription.

The only downside of such personalization is that if you have way too many content categories, it won’t be possible to create forms for each.

In such cases, real time or dynamic personalization is your best bet.

Type #2. Real time or dynamic personalization

In dynamic personalization, you create just one template optin form and insert HTML tags into it. These tags pull the relevant elements from the page/post a user is reading and show an optin offer based on that.

So for this example, your optin form copy will look like:

Sign up to get all our <tag> stories in your inbox.

The rest of the form contents and design stay the same.

This time, though, Digioh will identify the right values to fill into the tags. The same optin form will show up differently based on the visitor’s reading session.

For example:

Sign up to get all our <Vegan>diet stories in your inbox.

Sign up to get all our <Blood type> diet stories in your inbox.

Sign up to get all our <Oatmeal> diet stories in your inbox.

So that’s about it for real-time personalization. Let’s now see some specific implementations.

4 ways to personalize your optin offers

You can implement personalization in a number of ways. Here are 4 great ones to get you started.

#1. Personalizing the optin offer based on what the visitor is looking at

This is the same personalization we were discussing above —the one implemented with HTML tags.

Here, you see the content the visitor is reading and personalize your optin offer based on that.

GameSpot, does some terrific dynamic personalization for their gaming review site. Dynamic personalization is the only way to go for them because with over 100,000+ game titles, it’s not possible for GameSpot to create customized signup forms for each.

GameSpot uses Digioh to automatically detect what game title the visitor is looking at and then shows them a targeted lightbox by pulling in the game title and image from the same page.

The following screenshot shows how Digioh picks the game’s title and image for making the personalized optin offer:

You can also implement this manually by creating different signup forms according to the different game categories (if not titles).

#2. Personalizing based on user type

Sometimes, a site has different types of users. AirBnB for example. It has both guests to book the lodgings as well as hosts.

For such sites, it’s best to personalize optin offers based on the interests of the different audience types.

A great example of personalization for user types can be found on Saatchi, the world’s leading online art gallery. Saatchi personalizes its optin offers for its two main users — Artists and Buyers.

Here’s the optin form they show to their buyers:

#3. Personalizing based on PPC ads

Once a user clicks on a PPC ad and lands on your site, your landing page’s job is to get the sale.

Now, you’ll know that a discount is a great incentive for getting that sale.

With Digioh’s personalization power, you can actually make such discount offers in real-time. Because Digioh can read in the keyword from an ad click, it can create dynamic discount offers based on the keyword.

For example, if you sell white T-shirts and run PPC campaigns for the same, and a searcher Googles “White T-shirts” and clicks on one of your ads and lands on your store, you can show this person a “10% Off all White T-Shirts” offer.

This is a great way to hook your readers on your landing or product pages.

#4. Personalizing based on visitor data

A tool like Digioh uses cookies to read/collect a lot of data about a site visitor, including things like a visitor’s:

Location

IP address

Source (organic or social or other referral sites)

Campaign parameters

And more.

You can use all this data to design optin offers that are highly personalized and relevant to you visitors.

Conclusion

Optin form personalization is your first step toward building a high converting list. If you aren’t implementing it yet, start today.

If you’d like to learn more about how Digioh’s optin offer personalization works and want to know how you can use it to grow your lead base, get on a call with our marketing team. Book a free Digioh demo now.

So … do you personalize your optin offer? If so, how has it affected your email campaigns’ open and click-through rates and sales? Let us know in the comments.